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Nov 30 2017

# London Grip New Poetry – Winter 2017/8

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This issue of London Grip features new poems by:

*Bethany W Pope *Maggie Butt *Ruth Bidgood *Helen Kay *Keith Nunes *Robert Ford
*Deborah Tyler-Bennett *Stuart Pickford *Sue Burge *Kerrin P Sharpe *Pam Thompson
*Jean Atkin *Bruce Christianson *Jan Hutchison *Phil Kirby *Stuart Henson
*Ben Banyard *Gareth Culshaw *Barry Smith *Mary Franklin *Laura McKee
*Carla Scarano D’Antonio *Merryn Williams *Richie McCaffery *D A Prince
*Lynne Wycherley *Leona Gom *Jane Frank *Philomena Johnson
*Steve Komarnyckyj *Stuart Handysides *Norbert Hirschhorn

Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors

A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry can be found at LG new poetry Winter 2017-8

London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December

Please send submissions to poetry@londongrip.co.uk, enclosing no more than three poems and a brief, 2-3 line, biography

We prefer to get submissions in the following windows: December-January, March-April, June-July and September-October i.e. avoiding the months when we are busy compiling a new issue

Editorial

There is a good chance that this selection of new poetry will be the 1000th posting on London Grip since Patricia Morris founded the magazine in 2007. Ensuring that we hit this target exactly is beyond the poetry editor’s pay grade; but it can safely be said that we will be within a fraction of one per cent of that milestone.

Readers with a head for figures will have reckoned that this represents a commendable average of around 100 postings a year – mostly reviews of art, books, dance and theatre (interspersed with the occasional opinion piece or personal reminiscence). These postings represent the excellent work of at least fifty volunteer contributors to whom we are hugely grateful.

This issue of London Grip New Poetry is the thirtieth since the present format was adopted in 2011
(although London Grip has been publishing new poetry since 2007). A rough estimate suggests that
we must have featured work by at least 300 poets – some of whom have appeared many times.
Enormous thanks are due to all of them. All past editions of LGNP are still on the website, as are the pre-2011 selections (filed under ‘poetry-archive’).

All of the above represents a small additional cause for celebration alongside the much more significant event commemorated at this time of year. We wish all our readers a happy and peaceful Christmas.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

http://mikeb-b.blogspot.com/

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***

    Bethany W Pope: The Dog in the Garden

    The landlord never suspected the bones
    he found beneath the cobbles. Skeletons,
    complete and every piece accounted for,
    laid out in neat rows below the fenced-in
    beergarden. Once, there was a cathedral
    set on the hill beside his thatch-roofed pub.
    The nuns were known for tending to lepers,
    but the Revolution saw to that. All
    he sought was renovation; new tiles,
    some patio furniture, a pavilion
    with a poured foundation to shelter guests.
    What he found was resurrection. The dead
    will not lie still forever. They bloom
    up like white shoots, nurtured by the bright blades
    of shovels or the sharp claws of dogs.
    These ghosts had fingers that disease had sucked
    to spikes which reminded him of Christmas;
    the tongue-polished spurs of a candy cane.
    One very tall figure had the hips of
    a child, and legs which trailed like a plant grown
    spindly, shut off in the dark. Very soon,
    his pub was overrun with historians.
    Luckily, they drank a lot. At night he
    lay (very still) in his bed and dreamed of
    the tips of white crocuses, the first shoots
    of Hyacinth, tendrils which shore themselves
    against fragments, ruins. His brindled dog
    (friend to man) twitched his legs in sleep, darting
    between a hoard of strangers with missing
    noses who sought to stroke him, offering love.

Bethany W Pope was named by the Huffington Post ‘one of the five Expat poets to watch in 2016’. Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian, described her latest collection as ‘poetry as salvation’…..’This harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escape.’ Bethany was born in North Carolina. She has lived in five countries and six American states. She lived in a South Carolina orphanage between the ages of twelve and fifteen. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Trinity, St David’s and a PhD from Aberystwyth University. She has won many literary awards. Her poetry collections include: A Radiance (Cultured Llama, 2012), Crown of Thorns, (Oneiros Books, 2013), The Gospel of Flies (Writing Knights Press 2014), Undisturbed Circles (Lapwing, 2014) , The Rag and Boneyard (Indigo Dreams 2016), and Silage (Indigo Dreams, 2017). Her first novel, Masque, was published by Seren in 2016.

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***

    Maggie Butt: Halloween Ghost Walk, Canterbury

    His tone is factual:
    of types there is your monk, nun or lady;
    of ladies there are blue, grey, white and red;
    of smells there is cigar smoke, lily-of-the-valley and sulphur,
    other signs are disembodied voices, or drops in temperature.

    Headless or faceless ghosts were not beheaded
    but apparitions fade with time, like batteries.
    There are toilet ghosts and bedside ghosts,
    who brush your hair or wrap cold fingers round your throat.
    The latest burial in the graveyard
    becomes the watcher of the dead.
    Most spirits are not malevolent.
    Most exorcisms do not work.

    We smirk and avoid catching his penetrating
    gaze, seeking out sceptics
    one-sidedly from under his peaked cap.
    But at 3am, wide awake in heart-beat dark
    I draw the duvet over my head,
    not to see, hear or smell, not to feel a drop
    in temperature, not to have my hair brushed
    by a nun who smells of sulphur.

Maggie Butt is a London poet, whose fifth poetry collection, Degrees of Twilight, was published by The London Magazine. Maggie is an ex journalist and BBC TV producer, now Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Middlesex University, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow in Kent. http://www.maggiebutt.co.uk

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***

    Ruth Bidgood: One Light

    Night. Where and when forgotten.
    Seen from a shore, black buildings
    climb on a starless sky. In one –
    the tallest – shines the only light.
    What most clearly I recall
    is how that mattered, how much
    I cared that it should shine –
    but the why is lost.
                                      For years
    the memory is gone. Then suddenly
    some chance, some random sighting,
    something heard, read, can wake it –
    and with it what I felt, still calling
    out of the baffling past, still
    dark as that distant night, still
    strong as its only light.

Ruth Bidgood was born in South Wales, and returned in middle life, to rural mid-Wales, which became her home and inspired much of her work. Her most recent collection is Land-Music/ Black Mountains (Cinnamon Press), a two-ended book with an essay by Matthew Jarvis, who has written a book about her poetry in the Writers of Wales series (UWP).

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    Helen Kay: Petrarch Names the Dark Ages

    He’s up each night translating Cicero
    I saw the line of light below his door.
    It’s true that words became his sweetest loves
    and in them hides the golden age of Rome.
    He pulled a blanket over centuries
    and then pronounced them Dark,
    a rotting corpse of literature and art.
    He hid his own desire in shadows too
    by pinning his heart on wedded beauty .
    I think he craved the pain so he could write.
    He is happier with a laureate than Laura
    and tidies his loss into patterns of rhyme.
    I am packing food for our ride to Padua
    I translate our trip to bread and horses
    as mother did for us before she died.
    I hear that the plague is spreading
    black years behind, black years ahead.
    Only his words preserve the light.

Helen Kay is sometimes known as the chicken poet because of her debut pamphlet A Poultry Lover’s Guide To Poetry (Indigo Dreams, 2015). She has had poems published in magazines including IS&T, Rialto and Orbis. she was a runner up in the High Sheriff’s Cheshire Prize for Literature in 2016 and was shortlisted for the 2017 Paper Swans pamphlet prize

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***

    Keith Nunes: Rowley’s maelstrom of epiphanies

    Rowley stands up abruptly
    clicks into ram-rod straight

    he rhythmically
    displays the fine art
    of tying up his long cinnamon hair

    initially he speaks in tones of the kereru
    and then rising to a point
    launches into the string quartet of tui

    outside the radio-waves of rain
    are profiled by the mango street light

    ‘I’ve decided humans are simply
    vehicles for a cluster of one-liners’
    swallows his 10th cup of coffee

    ‘of course one line is more than enough
    for some lives’

    he scans for detail in his Van Gogh forgery
    hanging on the charcoal wall
    as he scratches at his lime-green onesy
    which sags a little at the bum

    the chihuahua’s head is buried in the trifle
    on the chaotic dining table
    his face stippled with fresh cream and custard

    Rowley’s invention for measuring the weight of air
    (with and without the sunlight component)
    will be launched tonight

    ‘I plan on exploding some myths about
    the disturbing motivation of wind
    so please bring your iPhone’

    one more cup of coffee for the road
    and we climb inside the cyclonic mouth of the night
    fame and fortune
    just three city blocks away

Keith Nunes lives beside Lake Rotoma where the two of them undertake a great deal of reflecting. He’s had works published around the globe, has placed in competitions and been a Pushcart Prize nominee. His book of poetry/short fiction, catching a ride on a paradox, is sold by the lunatic fringe.

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***

    Robert Ford: Number 44

    Some river or other was always waiting
    to push its wet fists through your house,
    to scrape the paper from the walls and
    leave their trout-coloured flesh bloodied.
    Its waters would rise up, and enter by
    the back door without ever knocking,
    vault the stairs and scour its channel,
    leaving almost nothing be, except
    the drill-square rows of Kilner jars filled with
    dried pulses frowning down tersely from
    safe above the plimsoll line, their shelf
    right-angling two walls of your kitchen.
    We’d lie on the sofa, facing, bemused,
    just our souls touching, beneath your
    paintings of famous horses winning races,
    and lift our cups from the floor as the waters
    ebbed, searching for an ocean to fill up.

Robert Ford lives on the east coast of Scotland. His poetry has appeared in both print and online publications in the UK and US, including Antiphon, The Lake, Butcher’s Dog and San Pedro River Review. More of his work can be found at https://wezzlehead.wordpress.com/

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***

    Deborah Tyler-Bennett: Boy Acrobat and Footman
    Inspired by William Powell-Frith’s Derby Day, 1858

    The Boy’s tongue tastes Fuller’s Earth, tastes chalk dust
     drying his Pa’s palms when preparing to negotiate
     a rope above streets never echoing enough applause.

    That liveried Footman doesn’t glance their way,
     absorbed in theatrics of his own: chinking meat-knives;
     salad-servers; lobster-cutters; tongs.

     ‘See him today, Britannia’s Great Boy Marvel!’
     Pa’s patter grinds far off, then cold-cut menace:
     ‘Show ‘em, Lad!’

     But coral claws, for demolition, thrall,
     then there’s the pie’s crisped ramparts,
     speculation (juices thick within) bubbling.

     ‘See him, alive, Britain’s Wonder Boy,’
     gypsy kids smirk at gaujo pantaloons, know bread-
     rolls can vanish, as carriage-folk get served.

     The Footman glances up.  An acrobat is hissing:
     ‘Look live, Son, shake yer self!’  His Lad still courts
     the pie, yet jellied-walls elude.

     Night’s living quarters – servitude packed into
     a picnic hamper.  The Footman’s dream
     accompanies Britannia’s Marvel down black-crust alleys –

     Waking sounds of breaking hearts … of lobster, cracking …

Deborah Tyler-Bennett is author of seven poetry collections, and three volumes of linked short fictions. Her current collections (both King’s England, 2017) are Mr Bowlly Regrets, poems, and Brand New Beat, short fictions set in the 1960s. She regularly performs her work, and takes workshops and classes in creative writing.

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***

    Stuart Pickford: Elephant Orchids

    Downstairs, the butler’s understudy
    is cutting his toenails
    with a vegetable-sink knife
    as if peeling a parsnip.

    He gathers his parings in a pile
    like the hoard of ivory
    beside the fourth Earl of Harewood
    in a portrait by Joshua Reynolds.

    The understudy raises a sash,
    chucks his horned slivers
    to all ten corners of the Archery Border,
    lush with weeping bottlebrush.

    Overnight, elephant orchids
    push out their trunks,
    wrinkled and blinking.
    Their tusks catch the moon.

    When the Dowager Duchess
    cuts an armful for the music room,
    they stampede to the ornamental lake,
    dig into the mud.

Stuart Pickford works as a teacher in a comprehensive school in Harrogate. His latest book is Swimming with Jellyfish published last year by smith/doorstop.

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***

    Sue Burge: Peckover House – Curiosities

    In the Morning Room, the Cabinet of Curiosities begins
    with a round brass tin of Jonathan’s hair,

    two sea-urchin skeletons, a Roman silvered glass phial
    in a cardboard box, a letter in copperplate from the vicar,

    a Venetian latticino swizzle stick,
    a diary with handwriting like ant footprints.

    A long-gone July - the gardener’s boy flicks the pots to see if they ring dry,
    scrubs the bark of the Himalayan birch into uncanny whiteness,

    uses the privy, painted Prussian blue to repel flies,
    checks the three three-hundred year old orange trees;

    maybe he sees the artist on the croquet lawn,
    painting a doll’s house mirrorworld,

    maybe Marmie the cat, most beautiful and loving,
    prowling and pawing the grass

    or Damson, dusty black with tragic eyes and bony back
    meowing near the little graves of her ancestors.

    There could be the smell of pigeon pie,
    the wooden slap of Scotch Hands shaping butter pats,

    And those men on stilts, harvesting sedge, willow, reeds, turf
    from the marshes here in the beforetimes, their ploughed faces,

    spatuline hands scored with reed-burn,
    do their footfalls still shiver below the rosebeds?

    But for now it is still July, bees spill from the hives
    amidst foreign plants, displayed like Rembrandts.

    Alexandrina’s butler serves tea, scatters arsenic
    and strychnine from his silver tray for the foraging birds.

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***

    Sue Burge: Bryce

    I learn this quilt will contain
    a hundred thousand unknown names

    all forty-two of my facial muscles
    try not to cry as I stitch the memory

    of the day you showed me your arms
    bejewelled with sarcoma,

    how I felt the stutter of your
    dancing heartbeat.

    I re-imagine you flying home
    to die in the Australian sun

    while we mourned among
    the cold grey bricks of Rotherhithe.

    Then the others too were claimed,
    one by one, long and slow and cruel

    as purgatory.  I honour your name
    in thread the colour of sunlight,

    whispering all the news of all the years
    you never knew me.

Sue Burge is a freelance film studies and creative writing lecturer based in Norfolk. Her poems have appeared in many publications including Mslexia, Orbis, Brittle Star, The Lampeter Review, The North, Stride and Ink, Sweat and Tears. Sue was longlisted in both the 2016 National Poetry Competition and the Fish Poetry Prize and has been longlisted for the Live Canon Debut Collection Competition. Last year she received an Arts Council grant to write poetry which celebrated Paris’s cinematic legacy.

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    Kerrin P Sharpe: from his world call centre

    while J works to reconnect
    our voices we hear frantic dancing
    part-Celtic part genetic
    from his world call centre

    though he is sorry
    for our troubles
    he makes no provision
    for daylight saving

    his handset recovers
    your number in Norwich
    while he follows
    my New Zealand listing
    on his screen

    we hear him scramble
    to change the settings
    and rearrange the slots

    just for a minute
    our conversation
    outmanoeuvres clouds
    mountain ranges oceans
    where it is day
    where it is night

    yet when we raise our glasses
    we are cut off

    and J's voice
    now thin as wire
    is so much louder

Kerrin P Sharpe has published three collections of poetry (all with Victoria University Press): three days in a wishing well (2012); there’s a medical name for this (2014); and rabbit rabbit (2015). Her fourth collection, louder, has just been completed and is in the final editing stages. Kerrin has also had her poems published in a wide range of journals both in New Zealand and overseas including Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet Press UK).

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***

    Pam Thompson: The Walk - Relleu, Late Spring

    If only this bag my daughter bought me
    as a present from Thailand, with its blue sequinned

    spirals, its frieze of golden elephants,
    had been bigger, I would have brought back

    that turquoise car, the colour of a favourite lost
    sweater, and the old woman walking slowly up the hill

    on two sticks. I might have included those clouds,
    barely clouds at all, more like sun-etchings,

    and the terracotta house, the campanile.
    I would have brought back a white snail,

    a handful of swifts, the cactus with yellow flowers
    which thrives in this dry weather, the mountain

    which yesterday afternoon was partially lost
    in mist. It’s likely I’d have included the cockerel

    whose crow commands the valley, that line of washing,
    the Moorish balcony, wild olives, an orange

    orchard, the clock chime, and placed them on a table
    in the shade next to the pine cones I’d put there already.

Pam Thompson is based in Leicester. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from De Montfort University and is one of the organisers of Word!, the longest running spoken-word, open-mic night in the Midlands which takes place at the Y Theatre. Her second collection, Strange Fashion, is forthcoming from Pindrop Press at the end of the year

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***

    Jean Atkin: Six stories

    The Story of the Door
    Each time it closes, the door
    makes other worlds imaginable.
    When it opens, through you go
    without thinking.

    .                                                                The Story of the Coat
    .                                                                The coat recalls its owner’s arms
    .                                                                and spine.  On the hook
    .                                                                it languishes.

    The Story of the Flame
    Wavering, and must be watched.
    Draws moths, like people.
    Double-edged, like a sword.

    .                                                               The Story of the Deer
    .                                                               When the deer run through the wood
    .                                                               they leave tracks.  When they are seen,
    .                                                               they are last seen leaping –

    The Story of the Stone Dog
    Under a blanket of snow the dog
    is unmoved, loyal in crises.
    Stroke his ears and strain
    your own to hear him.

    .                                                               The Story of The Cup
    .                                                               Holder of all things.
    .                                                               Curved to fit the palm.
    .                                                               Like a heart, warm, easy to break.

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***

    Jean Atkin: Saturday night in the north

    channelling off-kilter grace of young giraffes
    .          the girls are on stacked heels & on the town
    legs bare & long & orange

    they dash on water under streetlights, in tiny dresses
    .          shrunk to bums by midnight’s rain
    they totter hip to giggle

    &  each has raised surreal wet arms to hold
    .          a carrier bag as puffball on her head
    sheltering each hair & eyelash

    they trot towards
    the clubs, shiny, decapitated
    architects of carnival

Jean Atkin has published Not Lost Since Last Time (Oversteps Books) also pamphlets and a novel. Her recent work appears in Magma, Agenda, Ambit, Poetry Salzburg, The North, Earthlines and The Moth. She has held many residencies in both England and Scotland, and works as a poet on education and community projects. www.jeanatkin.com @wordsparks

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    Bruce Christianson: Girls' Night Out

    temperance is on the lash

    she sits beside the fountain
    toes dabbling in the water
    & watches prudence climb
    the ornamental lion

    temperance pretends
    the water is champagne
    drinks some from her shoe
    & wishes she hadn't

    prudence astride the statue
    leans at an alarming angle
    as she tries to fit her head
    into the lion’s mouth

    you know says temperance
    it’s important to celebrate
    our disasters just as much
    as we do our triumphs

    yeah chaz does that bollocks
    constantly replies prudence
    sounding hollow. temperance
    looks round carefully but

    chastity is nowhere to be seen

Bruce Christianson is a New Zealand mathematician who has spent the last thirty years teaching in Hertfordshire. Sometimes he and Chastity hold hands under the table at the all night café.

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    Jan Hutchison: Flight on a Wednesday Afternoon

    But Grandmother had vanished –
    mid-thought, mid-dash.
    Gone her brisk voice
    gone the map folded like a duster
    over her arm.  So Grandfather
    looked up and down the stairs
    and on the landing with its mistakes
    and hasty judgements.
    Then he napped on her winged chair
    that at night would eavesdrop
    on conversations of migrating birds.
    Finally, Grandfather came across her
    as she stood at her looking-glass.
    She was fumbling at the back of her dress
    with a pearl button that wouldn't
    quite settle in its hole.  She who from
    the start of his wanderings
    knew his hands would come back
    to where they were most wanted.

Jan Hutchison lives in Christchurch, N.Z. Her 4th poetry collection is A Kind of Hunger and was published by Steele Roberts, Wellington in August, 2017. Jan is curious about many things, including the secret lives of trees.

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***

    Phil Kirby: The Bird Man

    It’s not the boy in Sunday best –
    fresh white shirt and khaki shorts –
    posed beside a trophy-laden table
    on some unremembered afternoon;
    nor his grandfather, never a man
    given to displays of anything extreme –
    emotion, wealth when he had it –
    though the cups and rosettes somehow
    contradict that version of the past.

    It’s more the aviary-shed,
    the preep and chitter of a hundred birds;
    how entering meant breathing in
    its scent of millet grain and husk,
    the dry and dusty feathered air
    which parched the throat; and how
    the coloured ringlets’ numbered code,
    the strange and chalk-white cuttlefish
    and pristine boxes just for shows,
    seemed like the secrets of a breeder’s art.
    And everywhere the weightless moult
    of yellows, greens; of greys and cobalt blue…

    And then it’s something else:
    not just the questions of where it all went,
    who had the birds and when it all stopped –
    that nurturing from egg to ‘First Prize’ winner –
    but the grandmother taken too early;
    the empty shed; the garden falling silent.

Phil Kirby spent most of his working life as an English teacher. His collection, Watermarks (Arrowhead) is now officially ‘sold out’ but the last remaining copies are available by contact through www.waldeanpress.co.uk/page7.html. Hopefully, a second collection is coming soon.

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***

    Stuart Henson: The Shed

    Step in it’s a tardis: vortex of smells
    distilled a century – of  pre-war
    timber, earth-floor, and the gold decay
    of sawdust, linseed, two-stroke oil.

    Is this what happens, then?  All falls
    in place as you’re sucked down
    through boards and beams, the sun’s migraine
    toward some backward ebb of space

    by webs of rope-slack, amber panes
    that seem to stain long afternoons
    left there alone, lost to make sense
    of time’s great centrifuge, its huge mistake.

    Now while you shrink to half your size
    bemused by beetle-sift, hammocks of flies
    you marvel at the fat bench vice
    haunched like a Buddha on its height –

    that and the square-tanked Velocette
    you scramble on and don scuffed
    gauntlets, goggles, Biggles-eyed,
    throat-rev the throttle, ease the brake…

    Behind, dry wallflowers and trellises,
    tall shadows reaching to embrace…
    Kick down my canny lad. Accelerate.
    Back to the future and its great escape.

Stuart Henson‘s Feast of Fools was reviewed by D A Prince in London Grip. The Way You Know It is due from Shoestring in 2018.

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    Ben Banyard: Extension

    The garage is gone, making way
    for this mound of rubble and mud.
    A metre-deep trench frowns from the ground,
    expecting a gush of concrete.

    I throw a coin in for luck,
    greet the builder with his white with two.
    He’ll spend three months here;
    blockwork, timbers, eating my biscuits.

    On top of this he will build
    new segments of our lives,
    places to work, write, play,
    to wash days from ourselves.

    We bury our hearts in the foundation,
    sealing in this morning’s rainfall,
    a stiff westerly breeze from the estuary,
    all that we are now and ever will be.

Ben Banyard lives and writes in Portishead, near Bristol. His debut pamphlet, Communing, was published by Indigo Dreams in February 2016, and a full collection, We Are All Lucky, is due out from the same press in 2018. Ben blogs at https://benbanyard.wordpress.com.

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***

    Gareth Culshaw: Perps

    The perps were our line
    the joint between bricks, that
    buttering of two faces, softening

    the wall. Making us believe
    things were not as hard as they seemed.
    Flemish Bond, English Bond, Stretcher

    Bond, some bricks halved, others
    in wait like a waiting foot. The weight
    of it all, building before us.

    Those years when time is of no height.
    And walls had no point, other than
    something to clamber over.

    We ignored the perps, seeing them
    as a weakness. A scoop with a trowel,
    tap with the butt end, dink with the edge,

    not realising that for every brick we laid
    corners came into our lives, and shadows
    and shadows, and shadows.

Gareth Culshaw lives in Wales. He hopes one day to achieve something special with the pen. He has been published in various places across the UK and USA.

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***

    Barry Smith: Home Front

    When we cleared my grandmother’s belongings,
    I was taken for one last look, blinking
    through the dust that smeared the worn surfaces
    where she lived out her final widowed years
    in a blurry grey haze of Woodbine smoke,
    sixty a day curling over the gold
    taffeta bedspread and walnut commode,
    crumpled plaid blanket draped over her knees
    vainly counteracting the chill that crept
    through her tight, rattling lungs and thinning blood.

    There was nothing we wanted to take home
    from that dour room which had choked her days.
    Upstairs, I was startled by the blackened
    bronze equine statuettes, hooves rearing high
    over sturdy youths struggling with the reins
    of fire-cast beasts from a classical age.
    And on the dresser, astride a dark horse,
    clothed in khaki and leather, gun in belt,
    gleaming boots plunged into firm-flanked stirrups,
    my grandfather gazed steadfastly ahead.

    As children we used to wonder about
    the one-armed man who heaved bags of sugar
    in the corner-shop where we clutched hot coins
    for humbugs; it was the war, some whispered,
    the one before the last which brought the broken
    men home: my grandfather was one of those.
    Wounded at Passchandaele, crawling to cut
    the coiled barbed wire, given a glass-eyed semblance
    of sight, Walter never settled but strung
    a loop in the kitchen and stepped into space.

Barry Smith is director of Chichester Poetry and co-ordinator of the Festival of Chichester. He presents the Poetry & Jazz Café each summer as part of the festival as well as running Open Mic Poetry each month. His work has appeared online, on youtube and in magazines, including Acumen, Stony Thursday Book and London Grip. He was runner up in a BBC Proms Poetry competition. Barry is editor of Poetry & All That Jazz magazine. Recent readings include the South Downs Poetry Festival. http://www.chichesterpoetry.simplesite.com

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    Mary Franklin: Red Chairs
    20th anniversary – April 6, 2012

    We watch from our flat window
    above the high street in Sarajevo
    as officials lay out in rows
    more than 12,000 red chairs,
    one for every Sarajevan
    killed by Bosnian Serb forces
    during the four-year siege.

    My husband’s eyes wander
    to the bureau and the photo
    of our young daughter,
    then return to stare
    at one of the small chairs
    where he has placed
    flowers and a teddy bear.

Mary Franklin’s poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ink Sweat and Tears, London Grip, Message in a Bottle, The Open Mouse and Three Drops from a Cauldron, as well as in several anthologies by Three Drops Press. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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    Laura McKee: this is my face before my parents were born

    finding itself waiting
    without any idea of the time

    in stone signs over entrances
    to Catford boys Catford girls

    in waters of the River Quaggy
    the River Cray

    in my great aunt's hare lip short lived life
    that stayed in nanny Maude's eyes

    my eyes have not yet decided which way to look
    have not been confused by dominance
    and wandered into the fleck greens of hazel

    my nose is not shaped by a fight
    between button and Roman

    has no scent memory
    Je Reviens Old Spice Ambre Solaire

    doesn't know how to find the way home
    by following itself

    my ears never hear
    the cries of mum and dad's arrivals

    or recognise my own first cry
    in a shock of black hair

    in a sharp intake of breath
    I hear twice again when they leave me

Laura McKee‘s poems have appeared in various journals including The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, The Rialto, anthologies including Mildly Erotic Verse (Emma Press), on a bus in Guernsey, in the library for refugees at the Calais ‘Jungle’, and one will soon appear on a friend’s patio, only when it rains.

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***

    Carla Scarano D'Antonio: Volcano

    Crickets fill the lap of night,
    walls sweat the heat of day.

    On the balcony she mumbles,
    words bubble up from inside
    boiling phrases she couldn’t say
    to her late husband
    (the bastard who squandered on his tart)
    and to her daughter
    (the bitch who calls me crazy hag).

    She rubs her head with trembling hands,
    squints into darkness below:
    the shadow of the other man who came last night –
    every night –
    begs her to join him;
    but it’s too late,
    he’s back in America now.

    The city sinks into torrid August.
    Sounds brood within,
    murmurs beneath closed lips.
    She is a sealed volcano.

Carla Scarano D’Antonio obtained her MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University and is working on a PhD on Margaret Atwood at the university of Reading. She and Keith Lander won the first prize of the Dryden Translation Competition 2016 with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems. http://www.carlascaranod.co.uk/

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    Merryn Williams: The Silent Treatment

    Silence is powerful, remember that.
    Clamp teeth, keep lips tight locked, do not retort.
    Meet each and all assaults with perfect silence.

    They’ll come, the loud-mouthed and impertinent
    like Egypt’s seven plagues, but let them rant,
    keep mum, stay dumb, ignore the verbal violence.

    God knows, I said too much when I was young,
    and half a waste of breath, so bite your tongue
    until their din subsides.  The rest is silence.

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    Merryn Williams: The Death Zone

    It’s not like going down but going up;
    the oxygen runs thinly, near the top.

    And now it’s hard to lift your feet.  You go
    with difficulty, through the deepest snow.

    Above the shale, that strip of sky is beckoning;
    at length, you touch the peak, and then there’s nothing.

Merryn Williams was the founding editor of The Interpreter’s House. Her latest collection is Letter To My Rival (2014) and she edited Poems For Jeremy Corbyn (2015), both from Shoestring.

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    Richie McCaffery: Dead letter

    You’ve been trying to contact me again –

    I hear the letter box flap
    but when I get to the door
    all I find are a few brown leaves blown in.

    It must be hard trying to write
    and speak all over again
    but this time without eyes or hands,
    a mouth or ears,

    with only the wind in the street
    and fallen leaves to make do.

Richie McCaffery grew up in Warkworth, Northumberland and now divides his time between Ghent, Belgium and Scotland. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets as well as a book-length collection entitled Cairn from Nine Arches Press (2014). His third pamphlet collection is due out in October 2017, from Red Squirrel Press.

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    D A Prince: Spoiler

    He dies in the end, of course he does; dead,
    all the debt, all those dread deeds paid off,
    that coin tucked in his mouth, done for,
    over. And did you expect it different?
    – a deus ex machina dropping down
    delivering death a taste of its own,
    a defeat, just for him? He dies:
    enough, end of. No dodging,
    no What-if? no Dare-he?
     Dropped over the edge
    at last. The late. Isn’t
    that what we all do:
    die?

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    D A Prince: The Shipping Forecast

    The backing track to leaving home
    whatever the sky says or the weather,
    playing its salt notes along Midlands roads,
    telling the time in its own measure

    better than any clock. Gales in Cromarty, Forth
    drum at the traffic lights: you up the volume,
    catching Dogger, Fisher as the lights turn green.
    Foot down, across the M1, hearing Humber

    veering northerly. On time: the road ahead
    as empty as a winter sea. Swing past
    the hospital as Dover, Wight prepare
    for thundery showers.  Blue lights at A&E

    and at the roundabout Biscay’s becoming rough  -
    the roundabout, landmark, and where you, as ever,
    remind yourself Sole isn’t where you thought,
    till here’s a parking spot, the journey over,

    the General Synopsis, 0500 hours,
    losing its identity. The day’s map drawn
    for them, for us; landlocked, a key code and ID
    opens the gate, as forecast, as routine.

D A Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. She has two full-lengths collections with HappenStance Press, the second of which – Common Ground, 2014 – won the East Midlands Book Award 2015.

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    Lynne Wycherley: extracts from The Testimony of the Trees
    In 2016, scientists uncovered relentless damage to trees from mobile phone-masts’ pulsing microwaves

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27552133. Added to other risks, how it speaks to our times.

    The Strangers

    Bleak, aloof,
    they needled among us.
    Grey lightning-streaks through the living.

    Phone masts, cell-towers, WiMax.
    Verticals, a cold-edged gleam.

    .        Marching steel-steel-steel

    Cadres on rooftops,
    microwaves pulsing through stucco,
    bone: nano-hailstones.

    The strangers. Ghosts to feed
    the screen-addicted ghosts.

    .        Marching steel...

    We are hallowmas-in-summer,
    rust-tinged leaves

    strange, someone says, there’s been
    no drought, tap-tap-text
    data-fix

    while daylight dips unseen
    trailing saris, Indian dyes

          in gloriam Dei.

    The Fire Jugglers

            Touch-screens, weevil-bloom.
            Channels, channels, consumers consumed.

    Here come the corporate fire-jugglers.
    Bored with tobacco? Beat this!
    Microwaves, millimetre waves.
    Delicate risks to body, skin.
    .        Not content with 1 in 3 cancer?
    .        Boost your chances
             with the latest upgrade!

    24:7, a toxic tisane,
    smart-homes drilled by smart-chips.
    .       All-wireless, hurry!
    Strip away the vines,
    the safe connections: fibre to screen.
    Strip away clematis,
    honeysuckle, clean.

           Electro-blight. Creeping headaches,
           hollow nights; Jenny Fry.

    Bury the warnings; spike the sky.
    .       Hurry! Make way.
    Expunge the ‘not-spots’,
    the oases. Eden-dots

    sanctum sanctorum.
    World-smoke.

Jenny Fry was a child badly affected by WiFi; she eventually took her own life For more details see https://vimeo.com/131798243

Lynne Wycherley’s Listening to Light: new & selected poems was published by Shoestring Press (2014).. Based in Devon, she also writes on wireless health issues for The Ecologist
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2988521/krakows_bold_step_to_curb_electromagnetic_pollution_reflects_growing_evidence_of_harm.html,

http://www.theecologist.org/campaigning/2988970/smart_meter_radiation_and_health_why_are_we_neglecting_nontoxic_alternatives.html

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***

    Leona Gom: Light

    "Pix it or it didn’t happen":
    a modern mantra for an age
    that has no time for time,
    believes the unrecorded life
    is not worth living,
    believes experience is only real
    if posted publicly,
    a new ontology dependent not
    on obsolete I-think-and-therefore-am
    but I-am-seen-and-therefore-am,
    a generation educated to
    believe that it is quantum,
    photons that are waves
    until observed,
    only then becoming particles,
    reflecting light,
    visible,
    real.

    But it is a dangerous world,
    the quantum one,
    always a new understanding
    one subatomic charm away,
    one new double-slit experiment
    to see light in a different light,
    and suddenly
    we are neither wave nor particle

    nor both at once, but
    something so unformed,
    so absent of weight,
    so insubstantial that
    neutrino particles pass
    through us by the billions
    every second
    as though we are nothing
    but empty
    space.

Leona Gom is a Canadian writer from the west coast. She has published 14 books of poetry and fiction and won awards in both genres. Five of her novels have been translated into other languages.

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    Jane Frank: If I Hadn’t

    If I hadn’t worked in a bookshop
    I wouldn’t have been wearing
    the Jack Kerouac shirt
    at the hotel tennis courts
    and the man in dark glasses
    wouldn’t have asked me a question
    that led to a love affair
    where I became suspicious
    of the beauty of camellias
    and learnt that there would be
    no reward for learning to cook moussaka
    but that pain grows poems
    and gold doesn’t float.
    I’ve sometimes wished since
    that I’d worked in a petrol station.

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    Jane Frank: Not Being with Hemingway

    We pretend not to look for you in Bar Marsella.
    It does not cross our minds you must have sat here
    Where we do, or at the table next, where an old
    Man is curled like a shell, a dog heaped at his feet.

    When we strolled the hot and knotted streets
    From the London Bar, we did not listen for your tired
    Steps or look for your reflection in the faded mirror
    Of the gantry as we walked in, and we did not make

    It obvious that we were peeling back our own layers,
    Dreaming ourselves as expats, shaking off the soil
    Of home like characters you would write, or necklacing
    Ourselves in dust and cobwebs like chandeliers

    That only dimly flicker. You wouldn’t notice us smile
    At the dissolving labels on the absinthe and carajillo bottles
    That may not have changed in the 78 years that we
    Haven’t counted. We make only a brief mental note that

    It is a winter night in Spain, that we are in the company
    Of locals, maybe poets. Each time the door opens we only
    Glance nonchalantly across. We don’t expect. The film
    Crew laughing at the bar don’t really dampen
    Our chances of not seeing you at all.

Jane Frank’s chapbook Milky Way of Words was published with Ginninderra Press in 2016. Her work has appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Antiphon, Takahe, Poetry Salzburg Review and elsewhere. She lectures in Humanities at Griffith University in south east Queensland, Australia.

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    Philomena Johnson : The Day You Died

    I found a dead sparrow
    striped sun and shadow
    by the slatted garden seat –
    your granddaughter

    her seven years packed tight
    in the spring of her spine,
    cartwheeled past daffodils
    and pansies – danced joy
    deep into her bones
    and the gardener,

    trailing winter's daphne,
    wheeled his barrow
    across the carefully tended lawn.

Philomena Johnson completed her studies at The Hagley Writers’ Institute in 2017 and continues to work on her first poetry collection. She has previously had poems exhibited in On Islands Eramboo in Sydney, Australia and will be published online in The Quick Brown Dog in November 2017. She lives in Christchurch, NewZealand.

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    Steve Komarnyckyj: Yorkshire Scarecrows

    Sacking heads with marker penned faces,
    Tilly Hats or baseball caps, the scarecrows
    Face acres of oilseed rape or wheat,
    Waves of gold or saffron or green surf
    Breaking or sighing at their feet.
    They do not give an inch,
    However the wind stampedes
    The nearby trees in a fir plantation,
    Or makes the zither of telegraph wires sing
    Or a magpie paddle the sky backwards,
    Across the Gordian knot of A roads around Leeds.

    The scarecrows bear the weight
    Of Yorkshire's skies uncomplainingly.
    They know a scarecrow never dies.
    They swivel on the roof of the Pennines
    Grinning above peat and Lancashire,
    Yearning to join hands and dance
    Over the Irish Sea and Moher
    To plant both feet firmly in the air,
    And geolocate  their straw hearts
    Lost like ours in the middle of nowhere.

Steve Komarnyckyj is a poet and PEN award winning literary translator whose work has featured in Index on Censorship, The Guardian and Modern Poetry in Translation. He runs Kalyna Language Press with his partner Susie in between looking after five cats and a dog.

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    Stuart Handysides: Welcome

    Before you come to call
    I release the multi-point
    lock on the front door
    so just a twist of my wrist
    will let you in.

    Not for you to be kept waiting,
    to hear keys fumbled,
    the clicks of a mortice,
    screwed withdrawal of dog bolts,
    the rattle of a chain.

    Not for me to peer through the spyhole at
    a bulbous nose and receding chin.

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    Stuart Handysides: Winter

    Season of fallen gloves
    trodden into tarmac,
    picking up damp and dirt,
    lucky ones cosying fence posts,
    garnishing garden walls,
    placed by optimists, who picture
    careful owners retracing steps
    in torchlight, and pouncing with delight
    (as if they would have have lost them)

Stuart Handysides’ poems have appeared in Presence, London Grip New Poetry, Pennine Platform and South. He has run the Ware Poets competition for several years.

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    Norbert Hirschhorn: London Winter Blues

    Long walk in the night  Sirens howl in two-pitch vibrato + a little child

    cannot stop crying   Dirty-diesel buses growl past  honking to get me

    out of  the way    Someone behind me keeps coughing    Home again

    Cold night air   sent out to shop at the 24-hour mini-market  for milk

    Pakistani night shift workers   sleepy-eyed  scan my stuff   don't help

    pack  I smile   what else

    Rainy night  not much going on at home  walk to local mall to suss out

    the bookshop  Closed   at 7pm   But the cinema is thriving  bang-bang-

    shoot-em-up  movies   +   lots  lots  of  places to e at   +   eat:   Nandos

    Rossopomodoro      Shikumen     Wagamama    Yo!  Sushi    Yoo Moo

    Yoghurt  + at the cinema all the popcorn/candy/supersize soda pop to

    last a long  long   bang-bang-shoot-em-up    My  wife says s he wishes

    she'd never got married   to anyone

    On  BBC  website   black  cloud  icons  every  day  for  the  next  five  +

    counting  In Hawaii sunny  68°F + the surf is up  Midnight here  a dirty

    mist descending  1°C  even birds are coughing    My winter bronchitis

    has returned  +  I was escorted from a British Library reading room

    when people complained

    Hardly better in the morning  Worse  When I grew up in WWII the pea-

    soupers  so t hick you  couldn’t see your  hands    People  walked  with

    canes  tapping  the  pavement     If  you  followed  the  tail lights of  an

    intrepid vehicle you  could end up in the driver’s garage  I survived  air

    raids  buzz  bombs   ambulance  klaxons   bunkers   all-clears   smoke +

    fire

    It continues dark + cold +  drizzly  Outside the  supermarket  the  young

    homeless man with a scraggly beard sits on a  bit of  newspaper  barely

    out  of  the  rain  under  the overhang  whingeing for  money to be  put

    into a wrinkled styrofoam cup  On a piece of cardboard is the sentence

    neatly  drawn by magic marker reading   Please  help I’m hungry   What

    a time to be indifferent   I am indifferent

    Dark +  overcast out   Cold   A few  desultory flakes land  +  die   Snow

    goddamyou  man up   Then I think of  Aleppo   But it doesn't help   A

    stone in my shoe

    False  dawn   walk  in  my  local  park   I  watch  various  breeds of  dogs

    running free + various breeds of humans throwing balls from their 'dog

    ball  throwing  stick’   Jack Russell  terriers  are best   out in an instant  +

    caught on one bounce    A  pair  of l ong-nosed  cadaverous  dogs  on  a

    single  l eash  saunter  by    muzzles  grey  dark  coats     they  make  me

    shiver  Whippets I ask  Yes + aren't they beauties   Well  ya  sure + I give

    them wide berth   Lap dogs   Pekes + Pugs looking like  yes here  comes

    the cliché  like their elderly women owners    The  women  walk  slowly

    chatting  in  a  neighbourly  fashion   the  dogs  chatting  in  their  own

    neighbourly  fashion   nose  to backside   Come here often

    Snow drops + a single crocus returning  like Persephone sticking a toe

    outside  even if the sky is cold + grey + still dark at 6:30 am  I  distrust

    spring  a  deceitful  lover   demanding  I be  joyful   promising  beauty

    immortality   It's winter I trust  when things are honestly dead  Cough

    Cough   The crocuses don't care  they just do their thing

    Middle  of  the  night  ruminations    Up  in  a  clear  sky  hangs Jupiter

    watchman of the night zircon bright  Spica in Virgo accompanying him

    over  these  past  few  months   On  these  last days  of February   the

    morning sky is scandalously blue  mocking me for still  thinking  dark

    grey thoughts  Never mind   life is

Norbert Hirschhorn is a public health physician, commended by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero.” He lives in London. He has published four collections, the most recent, To Sing Away the Darkest Days. Poems Re-imagined from Yiddish Folksongs (Holland Park Press, London, 2013). His poems have appeared in numerous US/UK publications, several as prize-winning. See his website, www.bertzpoet.com.

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